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Category Archives: book

I almost literally crawled under a rock toward the end of the year, in an effort to finally get this book completed. I can now report honestly that it’s almost there. (For a cheat sheet on its ultimate shape, check out my draft introduction at the book’s own site.)

Some bits and pieces from around here – some more personal than usual:

With the book’s delivery in sight (promises, promises, I know, but….), I’m now blogging daily (ditto) at the Ain’t Marching site. Subscribe to its feed if you can so you don’t miss out. Today, for example, I comment on two medical-whistleblower stories, and on the intrepid reporters who’ve been crucial in exposing them.

Speaking of intrepid reporters, the unparalleled Jina Moore keeps breaking new ground, and rolling out new features from her work in Liberia (a project of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting). Check it all out at her new site: this week she has a LONG, smart piece in the Christian Science Monitor Sunday mag, but I’m also intrigued by her older, sly piece on the guy who stole all the lawbooks, citing intellectual-property laws. (He needs some African Stephen James Joyce to give him a spanking.)

The web magazine I edit, Women’s Voices for Change, just gave me a taste of what it’s like to be in the magazine world: huge changes, a few layoffs, and a hot new editorial director who’s promised to make it famous. I’ll keep you posted as things proceed.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting to see if these folks find my work interesting enough to invite me in and give me hell for a few years. Maybe I won’t have to write more than two books that took Ph.D,-level work without that degree to show for it.

The next stage of Google’s book strategy became clearer on Thursday when the company announced that it would begin offering electronic books to any device with a Web browser through a new online store, beginning in the first half of 2010.

Of course, I was dreaming about something for which I have no contract, but which has tantalized me ever since I started with Ain’t Marchin’s Facebook page. A bunch of perhaps hopeless what-ifs, considering all the triple copyright issues involved; I used Google’s Bloomsday image, above, both to honor the great artificer (who invented the mashup in some ways) and acknowledge the anti-creative efforts of his grandson.

None of which prevents me from engaging in series of what-ifs. For example, what if:

each tight chapter offered an e-link to more extended documentation, and even longer scenes?

readers curious about, say, John Huston’s “Let There Be Light” got an actual clip of the film, and another click to find where they can secure the whole thing?

similarly, documentaries by Judith Ehrlich and Dave Zeiger cd be glimpsed and co-marketed?

I know the book needs to stand alone, and provide a full picture and satisfying story. But it seems silly not to make use of this place in the information undertow, once quaintly named a simple highway.

I’ll write more this weekend about the situation at Fort Lewis, which should concern us all and has already got the attention of Amnesty International. But looking at GI Voice, the newsletter of the Fort Lewis GI coffeehouse Coffee Strong, I was gobsmacked by the following cri de coeur from a young Marine.

The writer, Allen Huck, knows exactly what’s going on. His note speaks to everything we’ve come to understand about soldiers, and these wars. I reprinted in full in case someone who reads this can help. (Feel free to contact Allen directly via Coffee Strong.)

It was “Marine Corps Policy”, I guess. Before leaving Kuwait, we were handed out forms to fill out. Awful things…Did you see a dead body? Did you kill anyone? Did you participate in any sort of war crimes? Ridiculous questions. Especially, since we were never really informed of what exactly war crimes were. Maybe I did. Those thoughts continue to haunt my daily life, and my dreams.

On our return to Kuwait, we were given strict instructions on how we were to fill out these forms.

“Did you see a dead body?” – The guided answer was no. ”Did you kill anyone?” – The answer was also no. ”Do you feel you need immediate help and/or counseling?” – Absolutely not.

The questions went on. And of course, the answers were almost always “no.”

Perhaps this is the reason that PTSD is so rampant as a result of this conflict. Had we been given the help we so sorely needed, perhaps the homeless rates, drug use, domestic violence, and completely shattered lives would not be so rampant. Maybe not, but it sure couldn’t have done additional harm.

When I returned from Iraq, I was forced to fill out one of these questionnaires. I told the truth, and as a result, it disappeared. When I returned home, I went to my commend, and asked for mental health counseling. But in the Marine Corps, requests for mental health were simply not asked for. And so it was denied. As a result of that, I was separated from the Marine Corps indefinitely. I was ostracized by nearly everyone in my unit as “crazy”, which was the most horrible stigma one could be given. I was immediately kicked off base, my ID card was confiscated, along with my base vehicle stickers.

Essentially, I was banned from the Marines for requesting help.

Later on, I received phone calls stating that I was UA (the Marine Corps’ AWOL), and MP’s came to my house to take me into custody. Just about three or four months ago, I received a call that said I was reactivated, and was on the roster to be re-deployed.

Another blast from the past: from an invasion whose memory is mostly now buried under those now bleeding our soldiers.

Thinking about it now, I’m struck how how Bush I’s 1989 “Operation Just Cause” set the template for his son’s Iraq actions — a former CIA “asset” run past his pull date turned Public Enemy #1, just like Osama bin Laden. Rachel called it “Operation Pink Slip.”

It’s been forever, I know. I should have at least updated my other shop’s cheers as Sotomayor became a Justice, especially the soulful essay about how she, a wise Latina herself, felt during that confirmation ceremony. But given the demands of that other shop (go look! Make comments!) and that I’ve been writing the last two chapters of my book simultaneously, I’d made a conscious decision not to blog until I was done. Well, not completely conscious, or else I’d have put up one of those “Gone Fishin”signs.

But last week I finally went to this convention, which I’ve described to friends as “like going to a party where fully half your characters are there to answer the questions you never asked.” Veterans for Peace, founded in the wake of the collapse of the Nuclear Freeze movement, and containing many of the folks I’ve now been writing about for years.It began with a rousing statement from Rep. Donna Edwards (above), who like me isn’t a veteran, but who may as well be: her father was career military, and she remembers when her father was stationed in the Philippines and “if we wanted ice cream, we had to go all the way to Quezon City” because in military facilities, including the huge Clark Air Force Base, “all the hangars and freezers were filled” — she choked up — “with the caskets of young men and women who had died in Vietnam.” That told her, she said, “When we ask our young people to sacrifice, it’s our responsibility to get it right.”

I remember when Edwards was “just” the director of the National Network Against Domestic Violence, and we were working together on military issues: that one, like many of the issues jostling in my brain and this book, was challenge and enriched by the information streaming everywhere last week.

Much was super-informal, with benefits: e.g. I warned Paul Cox (right), who I’ve known nearly 15 years now, that he was a star of my Vietnam chapter, and as a bonus he let me see and upload some 1969 photos he’d just got hold of. (They proved what I’d always guessed: he was even more of a babe at age 19 than now.)

After dropping by the Women’s Caucus — where I also got to check in at the long-pervasive issue of military sexual abuse and homophobia— I got to interview Ellen Barfield (U.S. Army 1977-1981, now on the board of War Resisters League.) Barfield told me about being stationed in 1980 at Camp Humphreys, in South Korea, when her unit and many others were suddenly put on lockdown during the Kwangju Massacre.

“We were put on high alert; the combat troops were given orders, and up in our unit we started getting riot training.” she told me. Asked by fellow officers if women should participate, she and other women said hell yeah, we’re soldiers too — but matters never got that far. “That’s as close as I ever came to combat,” Barfield reflects now. “But – it wouldnt have been combat, it would have been killing civilians!” Already a Nation reader who’d been struck by the grinding poverty she saw in Korea, she set about upon leaving the Army to learn more about U.S. involvement in backing up Sung’s repressive government. “People are kept for so long from knowig their history,” she told me. She learned a lot from members of the then-newborn VFP such as former CIA Asia specialist aideChalmers Johnson and Brian Willson, who’d lost his legs protesting U.S. aid to repressive governments.

Barfield was soon drawn in by the nuclear-freeze movement, just as Philip Berrigan and the rest of the Plowshares movement were getting arrested at nuclear plants all over the country: Barfield was soon doing the same at the PANTEX plant near her hometown of Amarillo, Texas, and has been a “soldier for peace” ever since. I learned some of the latter story from a panel on nuclear-weapons issues, where a hikabusha (survivor of Hiroshima) asked through a translator what the U.S. was doing to teach its children about nuclear weapons.

At panels on The GI Rights Hotline and on active-duty resistance, I learned more about the still-ongoing cases of current resisters such as Agustin Aguayo (above), and of those in exile fighting for asylum, like Andre Shepherd (below), whose German support network includes a woman who’s been doing this work on and off since the Vietnam years.I didn’t think then — but do now as I write this – that if I had stayed at CCCO a mere year longer, I might never have felt able to leave.

Despite the friendliness of the members of Iraq Veterans Against War, though, I was perhaps too shy about the IVAW workshops, fearing they were tired of me already — something I regret and don’t, now.

Because on my way out of town, I touched base with John Judge — who has been doing this work literally since I was two years old, including with the G.I. Project of VFP’s vibrant predecessor. John described for me what he witnessed when Vietnam Veterans Against the War was neutralized by the Red Squad in 1974, “destroy[ing] the single most visionary and effective peace group in history.” (I’d already written about these events here, drawn from documentary evidence).

When the RU moved into VVAW’s Chicago headquarters (note the North Vietnamese star at the center of the logo), so did posters and newspapers with appropriately “militant” headlines, such as: VVAW BATTLES V.A. THUGS. A civilian volunteer named John Judge, who watched the transition, was astounded. “Were they really advocating physical violence against medical personnel?”

The transition did, Judge added, have its comic elements: “They came in with these handlebar mustaches and sideburns, like Stalin, and these flannel workshirts.” Romo and his RU peers also told Judge to stop reading a pop history book in his bag, because We only read Marx and Engels here. “I told them, Those books are 150 years old now.” But the new regime also purged any members they deemed not “correct,” which included many who had been working triple time to help the new veterans get what they needed.

The January 1975 issue of THE VETERAN, whose “Vets Fight V.A” article was just before the “Victory to the Indochinese,” was also its last until 1996. The closer RU got to its goals, the more complete the damage to an organization once powerful enough to scare Nixon.

That conversation with John stayed mostly comic/elegiac. We did touch on the question I’ve since been trying, separately, to sort out: if the same has already begun to happen to IVAW, perhaps under the influence of it outgoing board president Camilo Mejia, the brilliant young scion of Nicaragua’s revolution? I mention the latter fact in full respect; Mejia (with whom I share a literary agent!) grew up in the fullness of a poet’s revolution, and his father, Carlos, wrote the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s national anthem. His speech last Thursday was compelling, as when he noted that the U.S.’ unfortunate Asian land war had left room for all the democracy movements south of the border.

But my concern was rooted in more than Camilo’s charisma: rumor has it that while I was worrying about ANSWER (Workers’ World Party) and World Can’t Wait (RCP) leeching off the younger group, I was too distracted by their sideshow to see the steady recruitment tactics of this group, only a few years younger than RCP and hipper/younger/jazzier in its presentation.

It’s not a meaningless question: dissenting soldiers are already being marginalized every minute. I hope those rumors are incorrect, but I’m not that optimistic.But my job now is to find out what actually happened, and to tell that story as honestly as I can.

(p.s. Thanks so much to Gerry Condon, whose comment below helped me correct some errors born of hurry and 50 percent humidity. That’s part of what this blog is for.)

go here, from now on. As the book’s publication year approaches, I need to give more energy here to its concerns. But I did want to let you all know how the move came out!

I’ve mentioned, methinks, that I’ve had a longstanding not-so-secret crush on the City of Brotherly Love (and sisterly affection) for more than ten years, a side grace note to my torrid love affair with the city of my birth. New Yorkers (and I’ll likely call myself one till I die) like to feel with Colson Whitehead that “I was born here, and thus ruined for anywhere else…..” The first Pelham in the subject line is Pelham Bay, the Bronx neighborhood from which I [was] sprung.

But I’ve always had a soft spot for small cities, and when I first got to know Philly I was living in San Francisco, which is even smaller, and came here because my organization had an office here. Philly struck me as a cross between Baltimore, where I once moved to heal from divorce, and that other colonial town where the Lenape first met Europeans.

Of course, as you know I actually moved nearly a year ago from Manhattan, to which I moved in 2000 an exultant new lover. The circumstances even made the papers. But it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that we felt able to look for an apartment here — and less than a month ago, had the incredible luck to find a place in Mount Airy, not the first Philly nabe I fell in love with (that honor goes to Old City) but a place that already feels almost as much home as did Washington Heights/Inwood, where we lived for six years, or my long-cherished Mission District. (Those two years in Greenwich Village were dreamy, but always felt borrowed.) I do feel a little like a stereotype, being so happy about the food co-op, the lesbian-owned bookstore, but there we are.

Mount Airy, where we live now, is none of those places: it’s completely itself. Its history is slightly younger than NYC’s, though settled first by Germans in the 1680s (and first called by the English “Beggarstown,” which feels kind of appropriate for us if not the actual neighborhood).

The major street nearest to me also bears the name of Pelham, an estate owned by the Revolution’s hardest-working engraver (or someone else in his family). We don’t live in one of the nabe’s stained-glass beauties, but a Victorian that has its own deep charm

I’m writing this now as a transitional post between this and New in Philadelphia. There, I might feel more free to include quieter observations, like how it feels to be reunited with a cat or why I’m beginning to suspect that I’m actually in Berkeley.